Look at it this way: 3,000 years ago people were forming cities, now we can’t even maintain them.
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Once we figured out germ theory and drainage, we stopped abandoning old cities, like London and every other place who realized those things. Our other “improvements” like cars and bad cops (otherwise known as “cops”) haven’t been great, but Rome had lead and rich people and militias, better places from longer ago or more recent but obliterated by cannon and mines did those things better. There’s definitely things to learn from what we can figure out from ancient civilizations. But not the signature Classical nonsense.
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If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups
Nine preregistered studies ( n = 4197) demonstrate that advantaged group members misperceive equality as necessarily harming their access to resources and inequality as necessarily benefitting them. Only when equality is increased within their ingroup, instead of between groups, do advantaged group members accurately perceive it as unharmful. Misperceptions persist when equality-enhancing policies offer broad benefits to society or when resources, and resource access, are unlimited. A longitudinal survey of the 2020 U.S. voters reveals that harm perceptions predict voting against actual equality-enhancing policies, more so than voters’ political and egalitarian beliefs. Finally two novel-groups experiments experiments reveal that advantaged participants’ harm misperceptions predict voting for inequality-enhancing policies that financially hurt them and against equality-enhancing policies that financially benefit them. Misperceptions persist even after an intervention to improve decision-making. This misperception that equality is necessarily zero-sum may explain why inequality prevails even as it incurs societal costs that harm everyone.
open access
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How harmed can you be, when you have enough to live 100 lifetimes.
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Are there 4197 such people, and what are the odds of getting them in the same room?
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We have the technology to maintain them better, just not the (collective) will to do it.
Advancing technology also allows richer people to get richer faster.
IMO.
we have the collective will, but not the collective capital
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Maybe if the obscenely wealthy paid more taxes (and everyone else were to actually demand it happen, at least in democracies), we could get more done. Maybe not everywhere though.
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Obviously what this town needs is BIGGER WIDER FREEWAYS so we can drive faster have larger traffic jams
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Hopefully, if it ever happens, we could spend it on things that actually make life better! 
We can always repurpose a lane. If the thing doesn’t have light rail in the same right of way so the people in stop-and-go can’t help but see themselves getting passed, then there’s no width that will work. Wide or narrow.
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By “prehistoric forest” do they mean very old trees or trees thought to be extinct? I couldn’t figure it out from the article.
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Do virtual black holes solve the black hole information paradox?
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“Our study puts to rest one of the biggest and most fascinating questions in history and determines when and where the single most notorious and infamous killer of humans began.”
The research team were able to find the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, in three of them.
[…]
The research does have some limitations - including the small sample size.
Ehh yeah. 75-200 million people died. I don’t think 3 teeth really ‘put to rest one of the biggest and most fascinating questions in history’.
I also don’t know why it is that important to find the geographic origin. But people do find stuff like that interesting, so ok.
I think it’s more interesting how something that had already been around forever by then and was well known just suddenly blossomed one day and in short order spread everywhere across the world so devastatingly, wiping out huge swaths of the population, and then just kinda went quietly back to being a normal old disease.
It wasn’t new then, and it’s still among us now. But out of all history, for just that one little slice of 7 years time - BOOM! It totally rocked the world.
Now, that’s interesting. Why did it suddenly become so big then, and why did it then suddenly disappear back into obscurity again? To me that’s a much more fascinating question than where did it start geographically.
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I am not an epidemiologist, but I suspect it hit rat populations harder than human ones, and the sizes of successive waves were proportional to the size of the black rat populations at the time. Eventually the brown rat replaced the black rat in most of Europe, and the last major epidemics there were in the 18th century,
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